Books & Poetry

There was considerable panic in the offices of Penguin Books when a manuscript of Jeanette Winterson’s latest book, ‘The Stone Gods’, was found on a bench at Balham tube station in March. ‘They were desperate that I wouldn’t find out,’ says Winterson, gleefully. ‘They didn’t ring me or anything. But because then it went round on the media grapevine even I heard about it, and I was in a foreign country at the time. I thought it was very funny. And I thought: I’ll just play with that and see if it will go in [the novel]. One of the great things of not writing sequentially and not fitting it together until the end is that even very late in the day you can build something like that into the work. And then of course it swung the whole second part of the book.’
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In fact, ‘The Stone Gods’ is full of lost books, including a whole library swirling around in space which is intercepted by an interplanetary craft en route to colonising the prehistoric earth. Organised into three interlinked sections, the novel is a sad chronicle of humanity’s hubristic propensity to squander the natural world, and it hinges on our inability to learn from past mistakes, thanks to our failure to appreciate the importance of books, history and the imagination. The trashed planet presented in the dystopian first section looks at first like a vision of our future; in fact, it’s the species’ distant past on a planet called Orbus. The third section depicts a ruined earth eerily similar to the devastated Orbus, and also mirrors the Orbus section’s central relationship: a freedom-loving woman, Billie Crusoe, makes common cause with an artificially intelligent robot, Spike, against a fascistic, post-apocalptic society.

It’s the second Billie’s discovery of a manuscript written aeons ago by the first Billie that sets her on the path towards freedom, and there’s another key text linking the stories too: Captain Cook’s record of his voyage to Easter Island. Sure enough, there, in the centre of the book, is an eighteenth-century section narrated by a member of Cook’s crew who is stranded on Easter Island – that real-life example of ecological suicide, stripped of trees and all the necessities of life by a human culture more interested in worshipping its stone gods than in its own long-term survival.

It’s a determinedly non-linear book: Winterson believes in following her flights of fancy wherever they take her. ‘I think my mind works more like a maze than a motorway,’ she says. ‘It lays things side by side which have nothing to do with the calendar or the diary or the clock. It chooses often a very emotional perspective instead, because we don’t remember in a chronological squence, do we? You could be walking down the street thinking, “I’m going to meet Jeanette”, but at the same time you’re thinking about something that happened yesterday, something you’re going to do later… We all inhabit at least three realities all the time. I don’t understand why in this country there’s so much resistance to letting those layers come through in fiction. Why does it have to have a beginning, a middle and an end?’

Her preoccupation with time and with the philosophical questions raised by new technologies like Artificial Intelligence have been explored by science fiction writers from Isaac Asimov and Philip K Dick to William Gibson, but Winterson resists the SF label and cites Eastern religions as an equally valid inspiration. ‘It’s a Buddhist idea, isn’t it, that we’re doomed to endlessly repeat ourselves until we reach some sort of consciousness or enlightenment? I thought: Suppose this was true galactically, on a time scale that’s unimaginable to us?’

It’s this playful attitude which gives Winterson’s work its gloriously poetic qualities, as well as its slightly frustrating lack of focus. The swirl of ideas will certainly bemuse anyone coming to ‘The Stone Gods’ expecting a chunk of solid science fiction, while readers hoping for a strident green-issues manifesto will likewise find the narrative too slippery to follow. But as far as Winterson is concerned, that doesn’t matter as long as the book functions as ‘a place of ideas’.

‘After 22 years of this,’ she smiles, ‘what I’ve realised is that if you have a very linear left-brain mind, you’re not going to like my stuff, and that’s all right. If you want to get from A to Z, then it might be better to read something else.’

‘The Stone Gods’ is published by Hamish Hamilton at £16.99. Jeanette Winterson will be reading from and discussing the book at 7pm on Thursday, October 11 at UCL Bloomsbury Theatre, 15 Gordon St, WC1. Call 020 7292 5108 to book tickets.